Modern Nature - Softcover

One of England’s foremost filmmakers, Derek Jarman (1942–1994) wrote and directed several feature films, including Sebastiane, Jubilee, Caravaggio, and Blue, as well as numerous short films and music videos. He was a stage designer, artist, writer, gardener, and an outspoken AIDS and queer rights activist in the United Kingdom and the United States. He wrote several books, among them At Your Own Risk, and Chroma, forthcoming from the University of Minnesota Press.

Gay British filmmaker Jarman, who was diagnosed HIV-positive in 1986, follows up his cannon-blast memoir At Your Own Risk (1992) and his memoir of ``my Queerlife,'' Dancing Ledge (p. 505), with his 1989-90 diary of his days fighting his demons while facing the prospect of full-blown AIDS. The diary's overall theme is that of Jarman's illness and what he's doing about it. He begins filming The Garden--a kind of gay Garden of Gethsemane story set in the exquisitely kept (or at least exquisitely described) garden he tends at his coastal cottage at bleak Dungeness. Now and then, the diary looks back frankly at his youth, then at his now-faded love life, or rather sex life, since his friend Howard still lavishes much care and love on him throughout. What there's no getting around here is the immense ``footage'' Jarman gives to his garden, with page after page of silverpoint about his plants and flowers--growths that for most readers will register as totally unfamiliar. But no matter: It's Jarman's tie to his garden that counts--how it invigorates him, though temporary illnesses strike, including bronchitis and blindness. His film War Requiem is a bust, lasting but one week in New York before being pulled. His first week's rushes on The Garden are glaringly bad, ``out-of-focus shots, shots that fall like confetti. 16mm deadly, with no resonance. There is not a shot that is not ugly.'' When he finally begins taking AZT, the results aren't much better. Then the New York Film Festival turns down The Garden. Even so, ``I want to bear witness how happy I am, and will be until the day I die, that I was part of the hated sexual revolution; and that I don't regret a single step or encounter I made in that time....'' Courageous stuff, often very well written. (Nineteen b&w photographs) -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.